Handsome Jita

Handsome Jita is a selection of Vonani Bila's best poems from his three previous collections: No Free Sleeping (1988); In the Name of Amandla (2004); and Magicstan Fires (2006). Vonani Bila is one of South Africa's most incisive and socially-critical poetic voices. His is the eye tha refuses to look away. With unfaltering clarity he brings to light the stories of shame, degradation and despair that lurk in the hidden reaches of our national consciousness - and conscience. His poems invoke the shadow world of alternate reality inhabited by the denizens fo the social fringes: sex workers, destitute pensioners, victims of violence, domestic and political, and the other social and political discards - the 'inconvenient truths' of a South Africa 'that has the best constitution in the world', Bila's writing is breathtaking in its narrative command and intelligent, articulate anger.